This invention relates in general to surface inspection systems, and in particular, to an improved system for detecting anomalies and/or features of a surface.
The need to detect anomalies of a surface such as those on the surface of a semiconductor wafer has been recognized since at least the early 1980's. In the article “Automatic Microcircuit and Wafer Inspection in Electronics Test,” May 1981, pp. 60-70, for example, Aaron D. Gara discloses a wafer inspection system for detecting whether microcircuit chips are placed upside down or not and for detecting flaws. In this system, a light beam from a laser is passed through a beam expander and a cylindrical lens having a rectangular aperture, where the lens focuses the beam to a narrow line of laser light transverse to the incidence plane of the beam to illuminate the wafer surface. It is stated in the article that the smallest defect the system can reveal is less than 10 microns wide.
The size of semiconductor devices fabricated on silicon wafers has been continually reduced. The shrinking of semiconductor devices to smaller and smaller sizes has imposed a much more stringent requirement on the sensitivity of wafer inspection instruments which are called upon to detect contaminant particles and pattern defects as well as defects of the surfaces that are small compared to the size of the semiconductor devices. At the time of the filing of this application, design rule for devices of down to 0.2 microns or below has been called for. At the same time, it is desirable for wafer inspection systems to provide an adequate throughput so that these systems can be used for in-line inspection to detect wafer defects. One type of surface inspection system employs an imaging device that illuminates a large area and images of duplicate areas of surfaces, such as a target area and a reference area used as a template, are compared to determine differences therebetween. These differences may indicate surface anomalies. Such system requires significant time to scan the entire surface of a photomask or semiconductor wafer. For one example of such system, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,579,455.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,898,471 to Stonestrom et al. illustrates another approach. The area illuminated on a wafer surface by a scanning beam is an ellipse which moves along a scan line called a sweep. In one example, the ellipse has a width of 20 microns and a length of 115 microns. Light scattered by anomalies of patterns in such illuminated area is detected by photodetectors placed at azimuthal angles in the range of 80 to 100°, where an azimuthal angle of a photodetector is defined as the angle made by the direction of light collected by the photodetector from the illuminated area and the direction of the illumination beam when viewed from the top. The signals detected by the photodetectors from a region are used to construct templates. When the elliptical spot is moved along the scan line to a neighboring region, scattered light from structures within the spot is again detected and the photodetector signal is then compared to the template to ascertain the presence of contaminant particles or pattern defects. While the scanning beam scans across the surface of the wafer, the wafer is simultaneously moved by a mechanical stage in a direction substantially perpendicular to the sweep direction. This operation is repeated until the entire surface has been inspected.
While the system of Stonestrom et al. performs well for inspecting wafers having semiconductor devices that are fabricated with coarser resolution, with a continual-shrinking of the size of the devices fabricated, it is now desirable to provide an improved inspection tool that can be used to detect very small anomalies that can be difficult to detect using Stonestrom's system.
In the wafer inspection system where a light beam illuminates a small area of the surface to be inspected, such as those by Stonestrom et al. and Gara described above, the size of the illuminated spot affects the sensitivity of the system. If the spot is large relative to the size of the defects to be detected, the system will have low sensitivity since the background or noise signals may have significant amplitudes in relation to the amplitudes of the signals indicating anomalies within the spot. In order to detect smaller and smaller defects, it is, therefore, desirable to reduce the size of the illuminated area on the wafer surface.
However, as the size of the illuminated area is reduced, throughput is usually also reduced. In addition, a smaller spot size imposes a much more stringent requirement for alignment and registration. As discussed above, in many wafer inspection systems, it is common to perform a target image to a reference image comparison for ascertaining the presence of anomalies. If the area illuminated is not the intended target area but is shifted relative to the target area, the comparison may yield false counts and may become totally meaningless. Such shifting of the image relative to the intended target area is known as misregistration.
Misregistration errors can be caused by misalignment of the illumination optics due to many causes such as mechanical vibrations, as well as by change in the position of the wafer such as wafer warp or wafer tilt or other irregularities on the wafer surface. For this reason, a wafer positioning system has been proposed as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,530,550 to Nikoonahad et al. In this patent, Nikoonahad et al. propose to use the specular reflection of the scanning beam and a position sensitive detector for detecting the change in height of the wafer and use such information to alter the position of the wafer in order to compensate for a change in height or tilting of the wafer surface.
While the above-described systems may be satisfactory for some applications, they can be complicated and expensive for other applications. It is, therefore, desirable to provide an improved surface inspection system with improved sensitivity and performance at a lower cost that can be used for a wider range of applications.